The Gods Are Broken!: The Hidden Legacy of Abraham

8 The Sound of Broken Glass: Jewish Iconoclasm and Anti-Semitism

115 8 | The Sound of Broken Glass Jewish Iconoclasm and Anti-Semitism The Hasidic rebbe Simcha Bunim once went on a walk with his disciples. Along the way, he and his entourage encountered a group of Jews engaged in casual conversation. Bunim said to his disciples, “Do you see those Jews over there? They’re dead.” The disciples were confused. Finally, one of them spoke up: “What do you mean, dead? They look perfectly alive to me.” “They are dead,” the rebbe said, “because they have stopped asking questions and searching for the right answers.” The Hasidim walked on, pondering his statement. Finally, one of the bolder disciples approached the rebbe and asked, “Then how do I know that I am not dead?” The rebbe turned to him and answered, “Because you asked.” The rebbe’s answer to his disciple is a Jewish answer to a Jewish question. How do the Jews know that they are not dead as a people? Why have the Jews continued to live even and especially in the face of brutal animosity, exile, homelessness, and physical and spiritual threats? It is because Jews ask questions and search for answers. What were the Jews supposed to be? At Sinai, when God made the covenant with the Jewish people, God said that Israel would become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19: 6). That is the Jewish mission in the world. On the one hand, God called the Jewish people to be a “kingdom of priests.” The priest’s role is to minister, heal, and teach. The Jews were to be a royal consortium of consultants and teachers to the world. 116 THE SOUND OF BROKEN GLASS On the other hand, the Jewish mission is to be a “holy people”: a people set apart from the nations and commanded to be different . These two aspects of the Jewish mission live in tension with each other, but they also nurture and reinforce each other. In order to teach and influence, the Jews must have a unique message, and that unique message implies a certain commitment to stay apart from the world and to live with the tension. What the contemporary thinker and activist Abraham Joshua Heschel said about the prophets might also be true about the people that spawned them and continues to herald their teachings: “The prophet is human, yet he employs notes one octave too high for our ears. He is neither a ‘singing saint’ nor a ‘moralizing poet,’ but an assaulter of the mind. Often his words begin to burn where conscience ends.”1 It is rarely easy to sing notes that are an octave too high. And it is never easy for potential listeners to hear those notes. The Genesis of Jewish Difference It all began with Joseph. When Joseph welcomed his brothers to Egypt, he specifically instructed them in how they should present themselves to the Egyptians: “When Pharaoh summons you and asks, ‘What is your occupation?’ you shall answer, ‘Your servants have been breeders of livestock from the start until now, both we and our fathers,’ so that you may stay in the region of Goshen. For all shepherds are abhorrent to Egyptians” (Genesis 46:33–34). Why did Joseph insist that the brothers identify themselves as shepherds, knowing that shepherds were repugnant and considered taboo to Egyptians? This was precisely the point. By identifying themselves as (socially abhorrent) shepherds, the brothers would guarantee that they would remain separate from the Egyptians and in this way maintain their uniqueness and integrity.2 But why were shepherds so problematic to the Egyptians? Because they worked with sheep, and the lamb was one of Egypt’s main gods. As many scholars have noted, the plagues that struck Egypt dur- THE SOUND OF BROKEN GLASS 117 ing the Exodus can be interpreted as being assaults on the various gods of Egypt: the Nile, the sun, even the first-born of Pharaoh. But even after the “official” plagues ended, one more Egyptian god came under assault: “Speak to the whole community of Israel and say that on the tenth of this month [the first month, Nisan] each of them shall take a lamb to a family, a lamb to a household” (Exodus 12:3). God told the Israelites to acquire a lamb—which is not “just” an animal, but an Egyptian animal god. It seems as if God had told the...